gemini://thrig.me/blog/2023/07/30/perforated-pipe-butt.gmi

Several days have been spent on the topic of the perforated pipe butt. The conversation concerned how to render a particular word in lojban, agglutinative word formation, the distressing details of how lojban weirds aggluting agglutes (aww man, I gotta learn rafsi too?! (no, not really)), that there is an algorithm for this, that grammar parsers can check that your forumlation isn't totally terrible. Now from a marketing standpoint one would simply not advertise perforated pipe butts. The world is not ready for such logic. However, a showerhead is the end-business of a pipe, and has generally got holes in it, so I'm going with perforated pipe butt. Some may claim that a showerhead might look something like a head, maybe that of a snake wearing a hockey mask. "Water barfer" may also be a good term, especially if there are often air pockets in the line, or if your mental age is somewhere south of 12. Again, not so good on the marketing front, where the mantra "do not startle customers with accurate descriptions of reality" is doubtless in fashion.

One problem here is that lojban has few root words, 1342 or so, and none of these gismu are "shower" or "showerhead" (nor "forest", go figure) so the dictionary has ended up with two constructed words, cavlu'i and cavysezlu'i.

cavlu'i (lujvo) carvi lumci $l_1$ (agent) showers $l_2$. GLOSS shower (wash by showering) RAFSI cav lu'i NOTES Cf. {cavysezlu'i}, {lumci}, {carvi}, {jinsa}, {zbabu}. RELAT carvi cavysezlu'i jinsa lumci zbabu cavysezlu'i (lujvo) carvi sevzi lumci $l_1=s_1$ (agent) showers itself of soil/contaminant $l_3$ with cleaning material(s) $l_4$. GLOSS shower (take a shower) RAFSI cav sez lu'i NOTES Cf. {cavlu'i}. RELAT cavlu'i

"Cleaning in some way related to falling liquid, possibly done by yourself". Neither of these capture the notion of the thingy you put on the end of a pipe or tube to facilitate the event or property of cavlu'i. Presumably if enough lojbanists got into dwelling or bathing construction a suitable word would be invented. Or maybe a part number, perhaps li vo ci no no xa ci no ci. Prime numbers did turn out to be impractical for naming things, though.

jbovlazbakamnandu (lujvo) lojbo valsi zbasu ka nandu $x_1$ is the difficulty of Lojban word-making. GLOSS Lojban word-creation struggle, Lojban word-making difficulty RAFSI jbo vla zba kam nandu NOTES Cf. {jbovlazbakemsedycro}. Making words in Lojban is difficult in a variety of ways, depending on what type of word you're trying to make. Proper {lujvo}-making requires a good grasp of the semantics of the relevant {gismu}; and of {tanru} syntax, especially the scope of various grammatical constructs; knowledge of Lojban morphology and phonotactics to correctly insert y-hyphens where needed and avoid unparseable wordlike forms such as *{tosmabru} and *{slinku'i} (see {valrtosmabru}, {valslinku'i}); and finally, if you want to add your word to the dictionary, facility with the lujvo-scoring algorithm. Making Type 4 {fu'ivla} (or {zi'evla}), on the other hand, presents the challenge of knowing, out of hundreds of wordlike phonological patterns, which will parse as single-morpheme words and which will not. (For example, the nonce word {kadvati} will parse but *{kazvati} will not; {fra'aso} will but *{fra'asoi} will not; {kadnazbakai} will but {kadnazbackai} is a actually a lujvo.) Making Type 3 fu'ivla is comparatively easy, but still requires knowing how to use hyphen phonemes right and, of course, how to not violate phonotactical rules when lojbanizing foreign words. Luckily, the work of checking potential word forms can be mostly automated now, if you have access to {sutysisku} or {jbovlaste}.

The Perforated Pipe Butt